So, after documenting how I save a timestamped log of my bash file, I got curious about what kind of analyses I could pull out of it. (caveat: I only started this logging about a month ago, so there aren’t as many data points as I’d like. However, there is enough to see some interesting […]
Category Archives: thought
Impressionism
20-Feb-11Spent a lazy Sunday afternoon at the Getty, mostly looking at a handful of Monets. Aside from being beautiful, they’re amazing glimpses into visual processing into the human brain. Impressionism is, at its core, lossy compression, right? (To digress a bit, I look at Impressionism as a reaction against photography, which says to itself “Look, […]
Random Thoughts on Taiwan
30-Dec-10Wrapping up my trip in Taiwan, I’m struck by a thousand random thoughts… Taiwanese fashion iterates more quickly than the United States! At a breakneck pace — and even me, fashion-challenged as I am, can see this. Before, I thought it was the result of less expensive clothes that can be bought for less and […]
I can has consciousness?
28-Nov-07Conversations at work recently have turned again and again to consciousness and self-awareness (what, you thought “Android” was just a phone? ;) ). Now, I’m not going to belabor the point with discussions of artificial intelligence and yet another amateur’s resummarization of Searle’s Chinese Room[1]. Instead, I’ve been thinking about self-awareness in groups of humans. […]
a short braindump.
02-Mar-06hmm, haven’t posted anything in a while. a smattering of notes from life: my mother-in-law just took a trip to Yunnan, China to take photos. I’ve posted some of them in this flickr set went on ISI’s bi-annual AI retreat a few weekends ago. a few interesting things that I may fill out later: SIMILE […]
Information, Knowledge as Art
28-Nov-05Came across Newsmap this afternoon, a google maps mashup by Ben O’Neill today that plots locations mentioned in BBC news on a map of the world. The implementation was neat, but I can’t help but dream of what this could be like. Imagine a map of the world (perhaps OLED, mounted on your wall), with […]
AI Scaremongering
16-Nov-05This post on boingboing, “Google: our print scan program has no hidden AI agenda”, which points to this ZDNet story cracks me up. Talk of a “hidden AI agenda” just cracks me up–it feels like scaremongering, of some lumbering, lovecraftian, inhuman intelligence, artificial intelligence. When questioned on whether a renaissance of the general paranoia about […]
Newspapers, Magazines, and Books
19-Oct-05I have been thinking about differences in media, specifically differences in the way we value them. Everything about a book says “I value this”. An author will invest more time/effort writing a book than a magazine article or a newspaper column. Books are made of better materials, expected to be kept around the house for […]
A good op-ed was in the NY Times a couple days ago: Recipe for Destruction. The article doesn’t address this point specifically, but i think a manhattan-project like thing that this article recommends is the only way that we’re ever going to get a cure for the common cold. In the existing System, there’s just […]